It is often desirable to measure a person's ability to verbally communicate. Scoring of a person's speaking ability can consider one or both of the speaker's mechanical speaking ability (e.g., pronunciation, prosody, fluency) and content. Typically, verbal communication abilities have been measured through human, manual scoring of spoken responses to prompts, where one or more scorers provides feedback as to the quality of the spoken responses. Manual scoring is often cost and resource expensive, especially in contexts where large numbers of spoken responses must be scored.